Global History, the Role of Scientifc

Discovery and the ‘Needham Question’:

Europe and China in the Sixteenth to
Nineteenth Centuries

Colin Mackerras

1 Introduction
One of the most important and intriguing facts in global history is the
dominance that the West established over the rest of the world in
terms of scientifc discovery and innovation from the sixteenth century
onwards. It is not too much to say that this scientifc spirit was one of
the key factors behind the Industrial Revolution and the growth of the
technology that enabled Europe to colonize so much of the world and
to assume a position of some degree of domination more or less every
where. This scientifc spirit remains a key feature of the contemporary
world, with access to advanced technology among the most important
of all levers of power.

C. Mackerras (*)
Renmin University of China, Beijing, China
C. Mackerras
Griffth University, Brisbane and Gold Coast, Australia

© The Author(s) 2018

21
M. Perez Garcia and L. de Sousa (eds.), Global History and New
Polycentric Approaches, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global
History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4053-5_2
22 C. Mackerras

Yet the fact is that civilizations other than the West have developed
signifcant bodies of scientifc discovery and thought. In particular,
China had developed a body of scientifc knowledge before the time of
the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century that placed it well ahead
of Europe. The most famous, and probably the most important, scholar
to research and disclose the pre-eminence of Chinese science before
that time was the British biochemist and Sinologist Joseph Needham
(1900– 1995), who masterminded and contributed extensively to a
multi-vol
ume and multi-authored work entitled Science and Civilisation in
China. This chapter aims to explore global scientifc history through the
prism of what has become known as ‘the Needham question’. This can
be for mulated as follows: why, having been so far ahead of Europe in
the Middle Ages, did China fail to produce the scientifc revolution that
occurred in Europe and in effect was crucial in creating the modern
world. Why did ‘universally verifable’ science ‘commanding universal
rational assent’ develop ‘round the shores of the Mediterranean and
the Atlantic, and not in China or any other part of Asia’? (Needham
and Wang 1954: 19). There can be no defnitive answer to such a big
question, as Needham himself acknowledged in the foreword he wrote
for a book that came out fve years after he died (Zilsel 2000). Yet it
remains an important question and the present chapter argues in
favour of regarding scien tifc development as a major site of global
history. It argues in support of Needham’s appeal to social and cultural
history for an explanation to this major driver of human history. This
author stands in awe of a scholar willing and able to probe Chinese
science in such detail as a counterpart to that of the West.
It should be added that the centrality of this ‘Needham question’ is
by no means the only way of approaching the development of Chinese
sci ence from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. One major
study is specifcally ‘agnostic’ about any claims that try ‘to explain why
China or the Islamic world failed to develop the rigorous mental
mind-set of mod ern science’ (Elman 2005: xxv–xxvi). Elman gives a
great deal of credit to the European missionaries and others for
scientifc development in China over those centuries, but also
emphasises the maintenance of a specifcally Chinese science. In
another balanced view, he attacks the pretensions of those who see
modern science in China only as the result of Western infuence and
intervention, but also presents Chinese science as no more than a
‘qualifed success story’ and eschews any ‘nationalistic claim’ about
‘the march of science in contemporary China’ (Elman 2005: xxxviii).
GLOBAL HISTORY, THE ROLE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY … 23

2 Joseph Needham and His Science

and Civilisation in China

There is already an extensive literature on Joseph Needham and his

many works (Sivin 2015). A major biochemist and Sinologist, his
Science and Civilisation in China can claim to be the largest-scale
English-language Sinological work since the Second World War that
was basically the prod uct of a single guiding mind. He has been
honoured as a scientist both by China and his own country, Britain.
As a person, Needham was unconventional. He was a Christian
social ist, a nudist and a folk dancer, as well as a scientist. He had a
long-term wife, Dorothy Moyle (1896–1987), and a long-term lover, Lu
Gwei djen 鲁桂珍 (1904–1991), as well as other relationships. Both
women and Needham lived to advanced ages, and he did not marry
Lu Gwei djen until 1989, that is, after his wife Dorothy had died. All
three were distinguished scientists in their own right and his frst wife
did not oppose his affair with Lu Gwei-djen.
Needham was not only very pro-China, he was also very
sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party. He got involved in the
International Science Commission set up by China and North Korea to
investigate the charge that the USA was using germ warfare in the
Korean War. He believed the evidence produced in favour of this
accusation, which later turned out to be false. His reputation suffered
seriously as a result. He was blacklisted by the US Department of
State and even after this was revoked in the 1970s, he found it diffcult
to obtain a US visa.1
Despite his anti-Americanism, Needham obviously had a very frm
foot not only in China but also in the West. Another major point about
him is that he straddled both the disciplines of the natural sciences and
the humanistic sciences. He was a major historian and Sinologist, as
well as an extremely important scientist. This needs to be said
because there are scientists who tend to look down on ‘those whose
careers are not primarily in the sciences’, but still want to research the
history of science. One scholar who strongly advocates the value of
the humanities says that: ‘While training in science is a marvellous
beneft for the historian of science, it is not a substitute for historical
precision’ (Elman 2005: xxx). It is not possible to direct any such
criticism against Needham.
Needham’s great work was frst proposed to Cambridge University
Press in 1948, and the frst volume came out in 1954. The original plan
was for seven volumes, but although this schema survived, all except
the
24 C. Mackerras

frst three were expanded into multiple parts. As of 2016, twenty-fve

volumes have been published, the most recent being in 2015,2 with two
volumes still in progress. These two incomplete items will belong
among the thirteen planned parts of Volume 5:
 Most of the earlier volumes were written in their entirety by Needham
himself, but as time went by he gathered an international team of collabo
rators, to whom the completion of the project is now entrusted. As the
project has broadened, so has the range of questions under
investigation. It is now clear that no simple answer to Needham’s
original question will be possible. The question has opened out into an
investigation of the ways in which scientifc and technical activity have
been linked with the develop ment of Chinese society over the last four
millennia.3

This gigantic project aimed to reveal the scope and originality of

Chinese scientifc thinking. ‘There can be no doubt’, Needham writes,
‘that China was, among the ancient civilisations of the Old World, the
one which was most isolated from the others. The originality of its
characteristic cultural patterns was therefore greater’ (Needham and
Wang 1954: 156).

3 The Development of Science and

‘the Needham Question’
Although it has received some criticism for being too positive about
China, Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China has been widely
admired and praised for opening up new thinking about Chinese sci
ence. The well-known Dutch science historian Hendrik Floris Cohen
comments that ‘for all his idiosyncrasies,’ Needham ‘was an intellectual
giant’ (Cohen 2010: 30). Even a scholar prepared to criticize Needham
quite severely for putting too great a stress on the ‘benevolent, pacifc
aspects of Chinese culture’ (Keightley 1972: 370) concedes that
Science and Civilisation in China was ‘one of the major scholarly
enterprises of the [twentieth] century’ (Keightley 1972: 367).
Possibly Needham’s most important contribution was to suggest
that China has a rich history of science. As Cohen has put it (2001: 23):
‘Needham had very little time for explaining the absence of a Chinese
Scientifc Revolution out of some alleged inability of the Chinese to
think scientifcally.’ The whole point of his magnum opus was to prove
precisely the reverse.
GLOBAL HISTORY, THE ROLE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY … 25

Yet, the Chinese ability to think scientifcally was a point that needed
demonstration. The eminent Chinese philosophy historian Fung Yu-lan
(Feng Youlan 馮友蘭, 1895–1990) had argued in essence that China
did not develop science because China’s values standards rendered it
redundant. From the time of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE)
onwards, Chinese were more concerned with looking after and infuenc
ing humankind than exploring the natural world. Chinese thinkers ‘had
no need of scientifc certainty, because it was themselves that they
wished to know; so in the same way they had no need of the power of
science, because it was themselves that they wished to conquer’
(Fung 1922: 261). Philosophies like Daoism and Buddhism were more
concerned with admiring and following nature than controlling or even
infuenc
ing it. For Fung Yu-lan to say that there was no science in pre-modern
China is not to condemn that civilization, but to praise it; it was not that
Chinese were incapable of thinking scientifcally, it was simply that they
did not do so because China had no need for science.
The fact that Needham knew he had found no fnal answers did not
prevent him from speculating and making some pretty defnitive state
ments. In particular, he rejected any suggestion that historical accident
was involved. Moreover, he appealed more to economic,
environmental, social and cultural factors than to scientifc factors
(Mackerras 1989: 130).
So, in this chapter we can divide Needham’s reasons as to why
China failed to produce the scientifc revolution, including the factors
that may have inhibited the development of Chinese science, into
several catego ries. These include the material factors, such as the
physical environment and economic matters, as well as the
non-material or spiritual, such as the philosophical and the
politico-cultural. Because it is global history we are dealing with and
because Needham himself had plenty to say not only about China but
also about the West, we shall be exploring some factors that compare
and contrast China and Europe.

3.1 Material Factors: Physical Environment and Economics

We might begin with an interesting passage comparing Europe and
China in one of Needham’s main works outside Science and
Civilisation in China. In it he places heavy emphasis on territory and
economy, as well as raising some other issues. He explains Europe’s
‘built-in quality of instability’ by referring to:
26 C. Mackerras

the perennial tradition of independent city-states based on maritime com

merce and jostling military aristocrats ruling small areas of land, the
excep tional poverty of Europe in the precious metals, the continual
desire of Western peoples for commodities which they themselves could
not pro duce (one thinks especially of silk, cotton, spices, tea, porcelain,
and lac quer), and the inherently divisive tendencies of alphabetic script,
 which permitted the growth of numerous warring nations with centrifugal
dia lects or barbarian languages. By contrast China was a coherent
agrarian land-mass, a unifed empire since the third century B.C. with an
admin istrative tradition unmatched elsewhere till modern times,
endowed with vast riches both mineral, vegetable, and animal, and
cemented into one by an infrangible system of ideographic script
admirably adapted to her funda mentally monosyllabic language.
(Needham 1969: 119)

So, the competition among the European states may actually have
contrib uted to innovation and creativity based on curiosity. China’s
territorial unity, which is often touted as one of the country’s major
achievements, may have
been a factor inhibiting the development of innovation and of science.
Some scholars, notably Karl August Wittfogel (1896–1988), have
attached very great importance to the physical environment as a driver
of Chinese civilisation. Wittfogel wrote widely on this subject,
especially in his 1957 book Oriental Despotism, basing much of his
argument on Karl Marx’s Asiatic mode of production theory. 4 He
proposed that China was despotic because of the need for water
control, in particular the need to build dykes, prevent fooding and in
general control the Yellow River on the great northern plain. The link is
that water control on a vast scale requires great organization, which
can only be provided by a highly pro fessionalized bureaucracy
supervising enormous and subservient supplies of manpower.
Wittfogel called this society ‘hydraulic’ and despised it as changeless
and cruel. He summed up the response of people living under this
despotism as follows: ‘To the demands of total authority common
sense recommends one answer: obedience’ (Wittfogel 1957: 149).
Needham and Wang (1959) reviewed Oriental Despotism. In his
review, he attacked Wittfogel for the ‘naïve assumption’ that Marxism
could not develop and that all Marxisms were the same. He denied that
China was despotic and criticized Wittfogel for ignoring good features
of its civilization, such as the development of science and technology
that put it generally ahead of Europe until the ffteenth century. He
attacked Wittfogel for reductionism and for regarding the need for
water control as the only source of China’s bureaucracy.
GLOBAL HISTORY, THE ROLE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY … 27

On the other hand, Needham acknowledged Confucian bureaucracy

as an obstacle to scientifc development. He also praised China for its
ability to control water and regarded this as a potential source of
power; for instance, he is on record as saying that the Qin dynasty of
the third century BCE built its power very largely ‘on extensive
irrigation works’ (Needham et al. 1971: 227).
Clearly, Needham saw a role for the physical environment in explain
ing the lack of a scientifc breakthrough such as the one that occurred
in Europe. He shared some points with Wittfogel, but his overall inter
pretation had none of the latter’s harsh condemnation. Instead, he was
appreciative and admiring of Chinese tradition and achievements.
In considering the other main material factor inhibiting Chinese scien
tifc development—the economic—we might also suggest a major com
parison with how things happened in Europe. An early but still
interesting theory concerning the development of modern science is
that of the Austrian pioneer of the sociology of science Edgar Zilsel
(1891–1944).
A Jewish Marxist, Zilsel fed Austria after the Anschluss, frst to
England and then to the USA. The ‘Zilsel thesis’ argues in essence that
science of the kind that led to the modern world could only take frm
root when capitalism emerged in Western society: ‘The whole process
was imbedded in the advance of early capitalistic society, which
weakened collective, magical thinking, and belief in authority and
which furthered causal rational and quantitative thinking’ (Zilsel 2000:
7). He posited cooperation between university scholars and superior
artisans, which was possible only from about the beginning of the
seventeenth century.
Sharing a Marxist approach with Zilsel, Needham was attracted to
his theory, in particular the notion that the breakdown of the gap
between the merchant class and intellectuals may have contributed to
the rise of modern science. The hierarchy dictated by Confucianism
actually put merchants quite low in the social hierarchy and thus
prevented the kind of cooperation between the merchant and
intellectual classes that occurred in Europe. This would certainly be a
factor inhibiting the rise of modern science in China (Cohen 2001:
23–24).

3.2 Non-Material Factors: Philosophy and Culture

One of the great divides in Chinese tradition is that between
Confucianism and Daoism. The former came to be dominant and was
the philosophy that lay beneath the bureaucracy and controlled the
state.
28 C. Mackerras

It was an ideology that talked not about abstract thinking so much as

society, not about nature but about human affairs and governance. It
was heavily rationalist, text-oriented and rigidly conservative. It
persisted throughout Chinese history and probably inhibited the spirit
of enquiry necessary for a scientifc revolution.
One can hardly claim that it saw no innovations, because the Song
dynasty (960–1279) spawned a new approach to Confucianism, includ
ing new ideas, that is known to history as Neo-Confucianism. However,
socially Neo-Confucianism also moved Chinese society towards more
rigidity in the form of greater oppression of women and stereotypical
family relationships. Moreover, the Mongol conquest of the thirteenth
century destroyed much of what the Song dynasty created that was
new, such as the growth of cities and commercial development.
Needham was harshly critical of Confucianism’s role in the devel
opment of Chinese science and technology. His views are succinctly
expressed in a shortened version of his great work:

Confucianism has little connection with the history of science. A religion

without theologians, it had no one to object to the intrusion of a scien tifc
view on its preserves, but in accordance with the ideas of its found ing
fathers, it turned its face away from Nature and the investigation of
Nature, to concentrate on a millennial interest in human society, and
human society alone. (Ronan 1978: 84)

On the other hand, philosophical Daoism was notable for its love of
nature and respect for the natural world. It was much more receptive
to science and technology than Confucianism, much more open to new
ideas and less hidebound and conservative. Daoism remained an infu
ential force throughout Chinese history, but it was always subordinate
to Confucianism. Men who had entered the bureaucracy and failed to
achieve their career goals or stirred up trouble by disagreeing with pow
erful people often retreated into Daoist creativity. This is the impulse
that led to some of China’s most enduring artistic creations, such as
the landscape paintings of the Song dynasty.
Needham was very attracted to Daoism and its positive attitude
towards nature. In particular, he admired Daoism’s most famous doc
trine of wuwei (inaction). He believed that wuwei ‘implied learning from
Nature by observation’ (Ronan 1978: 98).
GLOBAL HISTORY, THE ROLE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY … 29

Daoism raises other questions. A crucial one is whether humankind

ought to try and conquer nature or cooperate with it, and wuwei might
imply the latter. Modern science puts the emphasis on using the natural
world by recognizing the law of nature; it relies on practical experiment,
evidence and the natural law. On the other hand, science also wants to
conquer nature in the interests of humankind. Traditional Daoist think
ing in China would imply opposition to the extent of interference with
nature that the modern world has produced.
 Some scholars have contested Needham’s excessive emphasis on
Daoism as a motor for scientifc development in China. They point out
that Buddhism and even Neo-Confucianism have elements that absorb
observation of the natural world, with ideas on nature that approached
contributing to science. Ho Peng Yoke (1926–2014), the distinguished
historian of Chinese science who was for a decade the honorary
director of the Needham Research Institute, refers to the main
Neo-Confucianists as ‘philosophers of science’ but ‘not scientists’ (Ho
2005: 180). He describes a conference held in Cambridge shortly
before Needham’s death and attended by many distinguished
scholars, at which the theme was whether Daoism was the only
philosophical stream contributing to Chinese science, with most
contributors adopting a negative position (Ho 2005: 196–197). To be
fair, Needham himself was clearly impressed with Chinese cosmology,
which draws not only on Daoism but also on other philosophical
strains. He is on record as characterizing the Chinese worldview as
seeing a ‘harmonious co-operation of all beings … because they were
all parts in a hierarchy that formed a cosmic pattern’ (Ronan 1978:
306).
Earlier we noted the importance of Confucian bureaucracy in
Chinese history, as well as the connection with the physical
environment and Confucian philosophy. The state was extremely
powerful in dynastic China, with the emperor and his mandarins
holding considerably more power than was the case in Europe.
Perhaps the Confucian bureaucratic state was just a bit too powerful,
to the exclusion of other sources of infuence that might have made for
a wider variety of creative initiatives. Perhaps Alexis de Tocqueville
(1805–1859) was right when he famously remarked that despotism
makes people look ‘coldly on one another: it freezes their souls’ (de
Tocqueville 2010: ix).
A social connection can also be found in the main way in which men
were chosen for entry into the bureaucracy that ran this authoritarian
30 C. Mackerras

state. This was a complex system of examinations, which was based

on the Chinese classics and involved much more emphasis on
rote-learning than on analysis. The examinations bestowed enormous
social status on those who were able to pass them and are relevant to
China’s failure to produce a scientifc revolution in several ways.
Two of these deserve emphasis. One is that the examinations exer
cised a stultifying impact on the educated elite. This meant that the
most intelligent and educated people within society failed to be innova
tive because the spirit of creation contributed nothing to their chances
of doing well in society. It is not that they were unable to analyse, but
that they were never given the chance to do so. Second, the sons of
the mer chant classes tried to raise themselves in society not by
increasing their wealth, but by attempting to enter the bureaucracy
through passing the examinations. The very power that proved so
crucial to the development of science in Europe was stifed in China.
We might add another social phenomenon in passing. The examina
tions were open only to men and not to women. About half of society
was never given the chance to contribute. One cannot put too much
emphasis on this factor, because it applied everywhere in those days,
not merely in China. What we can perhaps claim is that women were
consid erably more oppressed in China than in Europe and were kept
even more frmly out of the ranks of those who might contribute
intellectually to society.
In the passage where Needham comments on the difference
between the physical environments of Europe and China, we noticed
in passing a reference to language, especially script. A major scholar to
see the scientifc spirit as lacking in pre-modern China was the eminent
American Sinologist Derk Bodde (1909–2003). Among the many fac
tors that he believed inhibited the development of scientifc thinking
was a written language ill-adapted to the expression of scientifc ideas
(Bodde 1991: 133). Interestingly enough, Bodde’s 1991 book was
actually the result of three years in Cambridge working with Joseph
Needham (Le Blanc 2006: 164). Needham was generally much less
interested in this factor than Bodde and even came later on to discard
it as irrelevant (Cohen 2001: 22). In the light of Needham’s exposi
tion of so many scientifc ideas expressed in Chinese, my own view is
that to discard Chinese language as ill-adapted to the expression of sci
entifc ideas is going too far.
GLOBAL HISTORY, THE ROLE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY … 31

4 Is the Needham Question Worth Asking?

The Needham question has been criticized as being excessively nega
tive. To ask why something did not happen in a particular country may
be less interesting than asking why it did happen. This would mean that
we should not ask the question why modern science did not emerge in
China, but rather why it did do so in Europe.
This is a reasonable formulation. However, there are grounds for
supporting the validity of the Needham question. Cohen writes (1994:
381) that, in pragmatic terms, knowledge of non-Western sci ence
would have been very much smaller without Needham’s work: ‘After
all, Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China owes both its
origin and the guiding thread holding its many tomes together to the
confdent expectation that sensible answers can be given to this very
question.’
All this does is to tell us what we would have missed had the ques
tion not been asked. It does not really lend academic validity to pos ing
the question. However, my own view is that the question is far from
irrelevant in academic terms. This is because Needham posed it in the
context of China having been a long way ahead of Europe until the
sixteenth century, when one might have expected that the great
breakthrough that led to modern science could readily have occurred in
China.
Another relevance of the Needham question is to ask not so much
why China failed, but why no other culture joined effectively in the pur
suits of this science for so long. After all, it was centuries after the scien
tifc revolution before China, or indeed other cultures, really joined in
the scientifc advance. As one scholar notes, ‘the Needham question is
not about an exercise in what-if history, but it’s about favorable cultural
infrastructure for science’ (Gorelik 2012).
And, from the point of view of the present chapter, it is perhaps just
as important to note that Needham raises questions of the utmost
impor tance for global history. As we have seen above, Needham and
those who discuss him make constant comparisons between China
and Europe, comparisons that involve not only science and technology
but also the nature of the physical environment and economic history,
as well as phi losophy and society.
32 C. Mackerras

5 Conclusion
The Needham question is essentially too big to answer. However, I
think the tentative suggestions that Needham himself raised contain a
lot of sense. In particular, I doubt very much indeed that there is
anything essential or ‘genetic’ in Chinese civilization or people that
would make the development of modern science impossible in China.
Also, I see a great deal of sense in asking whether cultural, social,
economic and polit
ical circumstances affect phenomena like the development of science
and its use for practical purposes. The question why developments
took place at particular historical stages or why they did not take place
at others is important and defnitely worth further research.
We live in the shadow of modern science and it has served human
development well on the whole. On the other hand, now we are enter
ing the post-modern world, it may be useful to rethink the overall pat
terns of modern science. Can modern science help us cope with the
new problems of environmental deterioration? At the World
Conference on Science, held in Budapest in 1999, the Chinese
scholar Liu Dun from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences posed
the question in the fol lowing way:

Can people really fnd a way of keeping harmony between mankind and
nature, science and society, industrial development and a healthy eco
logical environment, global economic integration and cultural diversity?
This is a crucial question for mankind in the new century. In this sense,
the ‘Needham question’ will continue to evoke divergent responses from
different parts of the world; and of course, its signifcance will extend far
beyond the more specifc matter of science and China.

What becomes obvious is that ‘the Needham question’ retains global

rel evance and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. The
relationship between science and modernity still matters, both in
China and globally. Science will be able in major ways to help
humankind into the indefnite future.

Notes
1. For a well-known and comprehensive biography of Needham, see
Winchester (2008).
2. Volume 6, Part 4: Métailie 2015.
GLOBAL HISTORY, THE ROLE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY … 33

3. See Needham’s biography on the website of the Needham Research

Institute: ‘Joseph Needham, 1900–1995,’ http://www.nri.org.uk/joseph.
html.
4. China is rarely central to Marx’s arguments. The ‘Asiatic mode’ relies
more on India than China. Marx believed that, due to the ‘climate and
territo rial conditions, especially the vast tracts of desert’ in India, the
despotic government must carry out public works, organizing ‘artifcial
irrigation by canals and waterworks,’ which form the ‘basis of Oriental
agriculture’ (‘The British Rule in India’ in Marx and Engels 1969–1970:
489). For a full-length study of the Asiatic mode of production, see Sawer
(1977).

References
Bodde, Derk. 1991. Chinese Thought, Science, and Society: The Intellectual
and Social Background of Science and Technology in Pre-Modern China.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Cohen, Hendrik Floris. 1994. The Scientifc Revolution, A Historiographical
Inquiry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
———. 2001. Joseph Needham’s Grand Question, and How to Make It
Productive for Our Understanding of the Scientifc Revolution. In Science
 and Technology in East Asia, Vol. 9, The Legacy of Joseph Needham, ed.
A. Arrault and C. Jami, 21–31. Turnhout: Brepols.
———. 2010. How Modern Science Came into the World Four Civilizations,
One 17th-Century Breakthrough. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
De Tocqueville, Alexis. Trans. John Bonner. 2010. The Old Regime and the
French Revolution. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications.
Elman, Benjamin A. 2005. On Their Own Terms: Science in China,
1550–1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fung, Yu-lan. 1922. Why China has no Science—An Interpretation of the
History and Consequences of Chinese Philosophy. International Journal of
Ethics 32 (3): 237–263.
Gorelik, Gennady. 2012. How the Modern Physics was Invented in the 17th
Century, Part 1: The Needham Question. Scientifc American, 6 April, web
version.
http://blogs.scientifcamerican.com/guest-blog/how-the-modern-phys
ics-was-invented-in-the-17th-century-part-1-the-needham-question/.
Accessed 12 June 2016.
Ho, Peng Yoke. 2005. Reminiscence of a Roving Scholar: Science,
Humanities and Joseph Needham. Singapore: World Scientifc.
Keightley, David N. 1972. ‘Beneft of Water’: The Approach of Joseph
Needham. Journal of Asian Studies 31 (2): 367–371.
Le Blanc, Charles. 2006. Derk Bodde. Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, 150 (1) March: 161–165.
34 C. Mackerras

Liu, Dun. 1999. A New Survey of the Needham Question. Paper delivered at
the World Conference on Science, Budapest, September, web version at
http://
wenku.baidu.com/view/6b87585077232f60ddcca1f5.html?from=rec&pos=
0&weight=1. Accessed 19 June 2014.
Mackerras, Colin. 1989. Western Images of China. Hong Kong: Oxford
University Press.
Marx, Karl, and F. Engels. 1969–1970. Selected Works, 3 vols. Moscow:
Progress Publishers.
Métailie, Georges. 2015. Biology and Biological Technologies: Traditional
Botany: An Ethnobotanical Approach. In Science and Civilisation in China,
vol. 6, Part 4, ed. Joseph Needham. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Needham, Joseph, and Ling Wang. 1954. Science and Civilisation in China,
Volume I, Introductory Orientations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1959. Review of K. A. Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism. Science and
Society 33 (1): 58–65.
———. 1969. The Grand Titration. Science and Society in East and West.
London: Allen & Unwin.
——— et al. 1971. Science and Civilisation in China, Volume IV, Physics and
Physical Technology, Part 3, Civil Engineering and Nautics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Needham Research Institute. Joseph Needham, 1900–1995. http://www.nri.
org.uk/joseph.html.
Ronan, Colin A. 1978. The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China Volume I.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sawer, Marian. 1977. Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of
Production. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Sivin, Nathan. 2015. The Needham Question. Oxford Bibliographies. An online
bibliography. doi:10.1093/OBO/9780199920082-0006. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Winchester, Simon. 2008. The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of
the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom.
New York: HarperCollins.
Wittfogel, Karl A. 1957. Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total
Power. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Zilsel, Edgar. 2000. The Social Origins of Modern Science. Boston Studies in
the Philosophy of Science, vol. 200. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
GLOBAL HISTORY, THE ROLE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY … 35

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing,
adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as
you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a
link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit
line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative
Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory
regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission
directly from the copyright holder.